25% of Republican women predicted to vote for Hillary

Mark Penn, the pollster and senior strategist of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, predicted Thursday that nearly a quarter of Republican women would defect from the GOP if the New York senator is the Democratic presidential nominee in 2008.

At a breakfast with political reporters, Penn said his internal polling shows Clinton would win over some 24 percent of Republican women in the 2008 general election because of the “emotional” appeal of electing the country’s first woman president.

Penn said the trend is as evident in the South, a region Democratic presidential candidates have had trouble winning in recent elections, as in all other regions of the country.

Penn said the trend indicates that Clinton would be a stronger Democratic presidential candidate in the South than either Al Gore was in 2000 or John Kerry was in 2004.